Hugh Jackman Bulks Up For The Wolverine

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Director Darren Aronofsky reckons he looked too lanky in the last film

“I don’t know how much I want to give away about it, but [director] Darren [Aronofsky] said with the last one, ‘Hey you looked great, but you’re so tall that in those long shots you looked kind of like Clint Eastwood, and that’s not Wolverine.’ He said that Wolverine, in the comics, is powerful, stocky, you know, he’s short and thick. So he said, ‘I want you to go there, get bigger.’”

Of the scripts, he says, “We finally have the character and with this mythology. Ever since X-Men , when I was kind of hanging around and reading all these comics, because I was cast before I ever read any X-Men comics, so I was trying to get my hands on everything. I remember saying to [producer] Lauren Shuler Donner, ‘Lauren, I don’t know about you, but I’ve seen this Japanese story, and I think it’s so good. It’s just genius, it’s brilliant.’ And we kind of always talked about it from there on. I sort of even wanted to do that in the third X-Men movie at first, but we thought, no, we really need to establish who he is at first, and we did that with X-Men Origins: Wolverine . And now this is sort of the cherry on top, to finally do it and have Darren Aronofsky direct it. I love his gung-ho attitude toward it and great vision. Straight off, it’s not a sequel, it’s a stand-alone, and I think we’re going to make one that people will describe as the best of the bunch.

“Chris McQuarrie has done a script that is just phenomenal. I read a story once that said that he wrote The Usual Suspects in 15 days, and with this one he said to me, ‘I just knew what I wanted, and it came out real easy.’ And he’s done an unbelievable job with it. I’m as excited as anybody to see what we come up with. I know we’re going to be met with huge expectations. The expectations will be high, but he’s one of the great filmmakers out there. I’m beyond thrilled.”